Famous ‘Characters’

of Tahiti American Writer’s Recollections

Mr. Charles Brown, Junior,

an American writer who has been living in Raiatea, French Oceania, for many years, wrote a private letter a year ago in which he revived some memories of people he has met in Tahiti. The follow ing are extracts: rHITI has produced some famous characters. Three of them are dead: Lovina, Lulu Spitz, and Bill Bambridge, who were unique, and who will live in memory as long as man remembers the period in which they lived.

All of them made Tahiti as happy a place—aye, a happier place—as one could find the world round, be cause of their having lived on it.

One cannot talk of the Tahiti of their time without talking of them.

In fact, Tahiti would not have been the same if they had not lived on it.

One, Lovina, was a lovable hostess, the most lovable in the vast South Sea; another, Bill Bambridge, was the Prince of Entertainers; and the third, Papa Lulu, was the protector of the “little people” of Tahiti.

I never knew Lovina; she was dead when I arrived on Tahiti in November, 1919, three months after my discharge as an ambulance driver in the French Army. But I did know Papa Lulu as a man who had the courage of his convictions.

Bill Bambridge amused me very much; and I am never going to for get him. Even more than the Prince of Entertainers, he was the Prince of Good Fellows —sometimes, too good for his own good.

I add Oscar Nordman to my list of Tahiti’s famous characters. Men and women throughout French Oceania will remember him for

his life adventures and for the jolly way in which he told of them.

In life, he is his own hero. And part of his life he has already be stowed on his granddaughters—by naming them after the ships on which he served as a steward in his youth.

I wish Oscar Nordman would write for PIM a story about the practical jokes he has perpetrated on Tahiti —for example, the story of the fisherman and the mermaid.

According to the version I heard on Tahiti long years ago, Oscar an nounced one morning in the public market that word had been sent

over from Moorea to him that on the previous night a Tahitian fisherman, drawing his net out of the lagoon with what he thought was an extra heavy catch of fish, was astounded to find entangled in its meshes a beautiful, buxom mer maid!

He told the credulous inhabit ants of Papeete that as a mermaid could not live in the blazing sun light of a tropical lagoon, the fisher man, who had carried her into a cave where the sun’s rays never penetrated, was going to bring her over to Papeete shortly after sun down —to present to a high official of French Oceania for a mistress!

And sure enough, at sundown the embankment along Papeete’s water front was crowded with the citizens of Papeete—waiting for the fisher man to arrive with the mermaid!

And, my version of the story went on to say, when the stars were be ginning to swim like silver fish in the blue bowl of heaven, and the fisherman and the mermaid had not arrived, everybody wondered if a high chief of Moorea had cheated

the high official out of the fisher man’s discovery. And they all cried, as they did whenever they were perplexed, “Ask Oscar, he knows!” 1 REMEMBER Oscar’s summing up of the character of that old South Sea shellback who was as hard as shell: Thomas Erskine Bunkley. “He was wealthy and very well known; but few followed his body to burial in Papeete.”

Years ago, in early 1920, I met him over a rum punch in the old Cercle Bougainville, hard by Papeete lagoon. I had come to Tahiti to gather story material for short stories for Adventure Magazine.

When Bunkley learned that T was a writer, he drawled across his rum punch at me, the while Henry McDonald, another scoundrel, tittered over his rum, some of his incredible stories. For example, he described his battle with an octopus up in the Tuamotus. “Don’t call me a liar when I tell you that that damn octopus had its tentacles wrapped around the ship. . .”

Henry McDonald was a scoundrel made to order for a young writer, such as I was when I arrived on Papeete beach.

I spent several evenings with him, at the Cercle Bougainville and the old Annexe on Papeete beach, listening to him and making mental notes, which I afterwards transferred into several note-books, of his dealings on the beaches of French Oceania.

And out in the sweet, kind land of Tautira, where I lived, through the month of February, 1920, I wrote a ten thousand word story, “The Fourth Boy,” around Henry Mc- Donald and his nefarious practices as a supercargo and trader in the Tuamotus. A little one-armed Tahitian boy was the hero of this story.

“The Fourth Boy” was published in Adventure Magazine. A copy of the magazine found its way to Penrhyn Island, where a friend of Henry McDonald read it; he sent the magazine to McDonald, who, after reading it in Tahiti, was so angry that he wanted to go out and pull up all the trees along

apeete waterfront, so that he Duld bash me over the head with lem when I returned to Tahiti.

But when I did come back, in )22, he had cooled off; in fact, I link that he was somewhat proud f the scoundrelly Henry McDonald lat I had created. For when he let me in Lulu Spitz’s curio store, e said to me, a smile on his face, Brown, why did you do it?”

I never got much copy out of [cDonald when he was sober. But nee he had a lot of rum-punches i him, he would open up and tell dventure after adventure, all of lem sordid, and all of them typical f Henry McDonald. He even told ie the stories about himself that rederick O’Brien incorporated in AHiite Shadows in the South Sea.”

McDonald had it in for O’Brien.

Hien O’Brien returned to Tahiti l 1920, to gather material and lotographs for his Tahiti and [oorea book, “Mystic Isles of the luth Sea,” McDonald went one ‘ternoon to where O’Brien was liv ig in Papeete and called for him ) come out into the street so that 3 could “soak him on the jaw.” ’Brien stayed indoors. After that, ; always kept shy of McDonald.

One morning, I met McDonald at ie Cercle Bougainville. He had )t yet had his eye-opener. I in ted him to have a drink. He asked ,e what I was going to drink, hen I told him that I should drink lemonade, he jumped up from ie table and stalked out, swearing

that he did not want “to drirjk with a kid who was not yet dry be hind the ears!”

It was a long time before McDonald took a drink with me; and then only with some others in the party. Then I looked Henry in the face and yelled, “The kid who is not yet dry behind the ears is drinking rum—if anybody wants to know.”